DFR: Faith ep 5

Welcome back to this week's first installment of Faith reviews.  Today we will be talking about episode 5.  Now, in episode 5 only a couple of major things happen.  Well, maybe one or two things more than a couple, but generally, I believe that we should be able to wrap this thing up pretty darn easily.  And then we can just sit back and enjoy some pictures.  Sound nice?  Sounds nice to me.  Let's give it a shot and see how it goes.

We start where we left off.  Gi Cheol has shown up at the assembly where the king is trying to shore up his kingship by using the doctor to prove that the heavens support him so much that they sent him one of their own for his own personal use.  Gi Cheol tries to basically say that the king has been duped and then he points his finger at Eun Soo, accusing her of being the "wily one".  Ooh!  Those are some tough words there Gi Cheol.  You're really pushing it.  Wily one.  Eun Soo handles the situation pretty well, facing off with Gi Cheol and calling him out.  She dares to ask him his age, pretty sure that she is older and therefore he should speak more formally to her.  She also goes on to say, "Oh wait!  You're name is Gi Cheol?  I remember you from the test.  Guess what?  The Yuan era is about to end and Ming is coming next.  Oh yeah, and by the way, I know when and how you die but I won't tell you, so there, nah nah nah nah nah". *tongue sticking out*

Alright, maybe that's not exactly how it went down, but it was pretty close.  Afterwards she's a little lot shaken up, but not to worry, hot ancient doc Lee Philip to the rescue.  I forget his characters name.  I don't much care when he brandishes a cutie pie smile like this.

His smile is second only to when he speaks English, and as we've already discussed before (you did read my Faith episode 1 review right?), that's not likely to happen in this drama, so I'll take all the smiles and eye candy he wants to dish out in lieu of the ear candy.  Yes, I said ear candy.  Ear candy can send shivers down one's spine like no other when done right, and Lee Philip's ear candy in Secret Garden?  Forgeddaboutit!  Well, don't really forget about it.  Remember it.  Fondly.  And repeatedly.

Meanwhile, Choi Young is still at the fishing hole in the sky with his dearly departed father.

I'd say "clinging to life" but he's not really clinging too hard.  He wants to die, remember?  Wants to stay there and fish.  Dad asks him if "she's still there (in his heart)", meaning that the girl from before was a love interest, not just a buddy, and she died.  Tragically.  Sure enough, we get a happy running through fields, well, happy swordfighting in fields scene, with some romantic smoldering stares shared between the two.

Until the whole King Pervy incident.  After that she ends up committing suicide.  So sad.  General Choi still carries her bandana thing tied around his sword hilt in memory.  Aww.  I hope when I die my tragic death that there is someone still around to wrap my sweaty do-rag on his sword.  Now that's just true love there.  Poor Choi Young though.  My heart broke for him and his tragic love story.  He must really take that vow he made seriously, because wow, I think any mere mortal man would have trouble protecting the man or even office responsible for such personal tragedy.  And I can see why fishing, whether in the afterlife with Dad or in the living world when he is released from his Woo Dal Chi duties, looks like a pretty good option.

Eun Soo, after their "moment" earlier, spills her guts out to Hot Doc, telling him how she was a specialist in thoracic surgery, and quite talented she might add, before she gave it up for plastic surgery, where the money was better and she didn't have to face the patients the same way.

Hot Doc assumes incorrectly that she lost too many patients.  This offends her and she stubbornly claims, "I have never lost even one patient!", which then leads to the real light bulb moment - if Choi Young dies, he will be the first person that she failed to save, and more specifically, since she was the one to run him through with the sword in the first place, the first patient that she killed.  Aw man, and here I thought she was so desperate to save him because he's gorgeous and awesome and she's already falling head-over-heels in love with him.  And the whole Psycho thing?  Just a loving pet name.

Back at their dark lair of dastardly doings, Gi Cheol and his cronies are chatting.  There is a little concern over the apparent curse uttered by the heavenly doctor.  She dropped an F bomb and told them to go to hell.  Now they're worried that this spells death.  No, she was just spelling out a four letter word, not death, but go ahead and think that if you want.  It'll make it more entertaining for those of us watching.  We like to see you squirm, you nasty nasty evil dudes.  Gi Cheol then goes to the king and plays nice.  And I finally get what the whole fake bloody note is all about.  The former king, King Pervy, is not dead, but is in exile.  (EDIT - Forget that.  I don't know what happened to King Pervy.  He may be in exile, he may not.  No, the one in exile that I think they are talking about here is the king's younger brother.  But I honestly have no idea what is going on with all of that, obviously.  Agh!  Politics and royal business is killing me with this drama.  My sincere apologies that I haven't the foggiest idea of what in the Hwata is really happening, so read the rest of this with that in mind.  I'm wrong, I know I'm wrong, but I don't know what's right yet so I can't fix it properly).  The 24 men killed were supposed supporters of the exiled king and therefore a threat to the sitting king.  At least that's the angle that Gi Cheol is going for.  We know and the king knows that it's a lie, that the evidence was planted.  Gi Cheol is no more loyal to the king than G-Dragon is an authentic bad toosh gangsta.

Dude, GD, you ain't never living this one down. You can't fool us when pictures like this exist.  You just can't.  And it's not the only one.  I have more.  Do I need to bring those out as well?

The king deliberates dramatically for a moment.  You can almost see the wheels a'turnin' as he tries to decide if he calls Gi Cheol out for his lie or not.  He goes with not.  I doubt it's because he is a coward though.  I think it was a wise move.  So often in Kdramas, I'm screaming at the screen because the good guys have shown the bad guys their hand waayyy too early.  It's good that the king knows that Gi Cheol is a liar liar pants on fire but lets Gi Cheol think that he hasn't been caught.  At least I hope that that is what is going on here.  I don't know, after the king's temper tantrum that comes later in the episode, I'm not quite sure on his emotional stability.  I will choose to believe though at this point, until proven otherwise, that the king is making a smart move here in letting Gi Cheol think he's effectively fooled the king into believing that he, Gi Cheol, is a loyal subject.  One teeny tiny thing backfires though.  Gi Cheol, loyal subject, asks for a favor of the king.  Someone back at his place is sick with something only the heavenly doctor can fix.  He wants to borrow her.  There is some bartering and whatnot back and forth, but the end result is that Gi Cheol gets custody of the heavenly doctor for 7 days and in that time he has to try to get her over to his side.

Eun Soo is a little preoccupied while unbeknownst to her, she is getting traded like cattle in the other room.  Or palace.  Whatever.  She's sitting there having a heart to heart with General Choi (who's unconscious) and very near death, as evidenced by him getting all frosty in his alternate existence.

She really must have some special powers, because as she is sitting there pouring out her soul to a man who can't hear her, she realizes that he is in cardiac arrest.  How did she know without the machine going "beeeeeeeeeeeep" and the little line going flat?  I'm impressed.  She leaps to his side and starts CPR.

Mmm...nothing like a good old fashioned Kdrama mouth-to-mouth first kiss.  I loved how the second time she did it, it was slowed down and a little more emphasis added to the "romance" of the moment.  Did anyone else catch that or was it just me?

She works and works, desperately trying to bring him back from the brink of death.  Hot Doc is trying to tell her it's no use (you always have to have one of those naysayers around by the way in scenes like this, just so that you, the viewer, know that all hope is lost).  She starts to cry.

The tear falls on his cheek.

His soul's cheek in the gray world also gets hit with the tear.

The tear starts working...thawing his frozen face - the frost/ice starts breaking and falling.  I actually really liked the imagery here.  I thought it was creative.  This show is pretty cool with its usage of imagery.  I especially appreciated that the spot of unfrozen skin looks sort of like a heart.  Intentional?  Probably.

So Choi Young is dragged back to the land of the living.  He's still unconscious, but he's alive.  Glory be!  Except right about then, the troops show up to drag away Eun Soo and take her to Gi Cheol's crib.  There's a scuffle, but since it is a royal order, she eventually is led off.

Choi Young finally wakes,

Good morning Sunshine!  So glad you're back!

finds out the doctor has been taken, and gets up to go save her.  Uhm, dude, you're amazing in all your heroicness and all, but you just died.  Like seriously.  You were dead.  As in your heart stopped.  Maybe you should sit back and let her have her week-long sleepover then try and rescue her when you know, you've been back alive for a little longer?  But no.  There's no reasoning with this man.  Okay, so was anybody else having a serious Princess Bride moment here?  No, seriously.  He's "mostly dead" then wakes up and, despite being physically disadvantaged from the whole nearly dead thing, goes off to rescue the girl.

Now all that is missing is Lee Min Ho softly and sexily uttering those 3 beautiful words that cause all girls to go weak in the knees, "as you wish."  Oooh!  Shivers of fantasticness!

So, where was I?  Ah yes, Choi Young off to save Eun Soo.  He is warned ominously by Hot Doc that he better not use his lightning power because he could lose it permanently as he is so weak.  Duly noted (and later ignored).

He rushes off to Gi Cheol's.  And waits to enter, looking all handsome as he does.

Then there's some fighting.  Fighting Asia style with the flying and physics-defying acrobatics and everything.  Ah!  Those are awesome!

And then there's the X-Men showdown.  Gi Cheol after all has quite the collection of "kids" with powers. Which is why he wants Choi Young on his team so badly.  Speaking of Gi Cheol's "kids", has anyone else besides me been reminded of this guy

when this guy 

is on screen?  I always think Squiggy from Laverne and Shirley when I see him.  It's gotta be the hair.  And I better not hear any "who's Squiggy?" or  "what's Laverne and Shirley?" from you all.  I may be an ahjumma, but I'm not that old...yet.  (And for the record, I am too young to have seen them when they were new, but not too old to have not caught them on daytime TV reruns as a kid when home sick from school or on summer break).

As Choi Young is fighting, quite impressively considering that he was just dead a few minutes ago I might add, Gi Cheol notes that he is only using his sword, not his lightning.  So he sics Killer Flute on him.

But oh no!  Try as he might, the deadly flutist can't pinpoint specific targets which means that everyone around will die.  Gi Cheol's okay with this.  Go ahead, kill my guys, I have my own secret superpower.  He either grows spider webs or ice.  Maybe cotton?

I don't know, but he grows something to protect himself from the flute.  All around the guards start falling, bleeding out of their ears and noses and mouths and what have you.  Choi Young has no choice but to use his lightning power to protect himself.  Uh oh.  I forsee a problem with this.  For now though he is spared and beats back the Killer Flute.

Remember the king's temper tantrum I alluded to earlier?  Well, here is where it happens.  Well, actually it was back a little ways, but it would have interrupted the Choi Young leaping up from his death bed and kicking serious bad dude butt, and we couldn't be having none of that, now could we?  So now I'll mention it.  The king is upset.  "The princess/queen (make up your mind people - is she a princess or queen?) couldn't trust me, so she ran to me and criticized me loudly.  Choi Young doesn't trust me and went there by himself to die. Since this so-called king is so cowardly..."(whine whine whine, escalate escalate escalate) to "It's probably too amazing to them if that kind of king had his own plan when he gave away the High Doctor!"

In other words, he's very upset that no one trusts him.  He starts to imagine all kinds of things, probably most importantly as we go forward, that the queen and Choi Young must have a little something-something going on on the side.  He's irrational and not thinking clearly.  It's kinda scary that this guy's finger is on the proverbial button.  While I feel bad for him, I'm fearing a little mental instability and inferiority complex might grow and morph into something truly scary and terrifying.  It does a little when he refuses to allow any of the Woo Dal Chi to go save General Choi.  Saving him would be going against his order which would be high treason and punishable by death.  He tells them that the only way they can save their general now is if they pretend to not know where he is.  By being there himself, he has denied the king's order and has committed treason.  The king is trying to give him an out by saying that because he was unconscious he must have missed the king's order, and since none of the rest of the Woo Dal Chi have met him since yesterday, no one knows he is there.  I get that the king is trying to help and I commend him for it, but, uhm, he's the king.  Can't he just issue a new order?  Or do a little more to ignore the offense?  I get that he's playing games with Gi Cheol, and so issuing a new order might be problematic, but ugh!  *throwing hands up in the air because I just don't know anymore what to think*  And this is why I don't like the politics.  Let's skip to the part that I do like... the end scene.

Ah, what a happy reunion! Til Gi Cheol shows up to spoil it. :(

Where General Choi tells Gi Cheol that he is there to retrieve the doctor and that the king knows nothing of his being there - that his reasons are personal.  Personal you say?  Why?  Ready for this?  He is there to rescue her because he loves her.

Ooh!  Is that the truth or just a clever plot on his part?  Or maybe a little of both?  We don't know, because it ends there.  But we might just be able to find out in episode 6, so how about we now head on over there, huh?  Sounds good to me!  Catch ya on the flip side fellow Faithfuls!


P.S.  Yes, I am aware that the "let's talk about just a couple of key plot points and then look at pretty pictures" plan failed.  Miserably.  Oh well.  Maybe next time.  Or not.  There's always just so much to talk about even when I think that there's not much to talk about.  Hwata help us when we get to the "Whoa! There's so much to talk about here!" point.